- I get almost all of my news, both real news and fun, people.com news, from the internet. My one "real" news watching comes in the morning when I check the morning shows for the day's weather.
- I do all of my banking via the internet.
- I use email and facebook more than once a day just to check in and see what is going on with my "friends."
- I write my blog and catch up on those that I follow.
- I check Pinterest (my husband's most hated website ever because it gives me so many "project" ideas both for me and for him)
- I "research" things, medical, religious, political, random off the wall interesting facts. Husband is the king of useless trivia and we are always looking up random tidbits of information just out of curiosity.
- And I will admit I play random games on the internet...like bejeweled or hidden objects games...in the quiet moments when everyone is napping and I'm not cooking, cleaning, or working on a project.
Being without internet for those few days was rough. Not so rough in the news and facebook/pinterest world, but what I found most irritating was not being able to look up the random things when husband and I were talking over the weekend. Thankfully, we are back up and running with a new, hopefully more reliable provider that treats their customers better.
In talking to a friend on Sunday and telling her how we had been without internet for a few days and were switching providers, she laughed and told me I needed to blog about my recent experience with the customer service reps so here goes.
We have had our internet through a major, non-cable, provider for the past couple of years. We really haven't had any trouble with them until recently. I mean, every once in a while we would have to reset the modem because for some reason or another the internet wasn't connecting, but those instances were few and far between and resetting everything always fixed the problem. But ever since the Christmas snowstorm the internet has been going out constantly. I was resetting it 5 or 6 times a day basically every day. After I reset things it would work for an hour or so and then go out again. It was extremely frustrating. Since other people I know around town who also use this provider were also experiencing issues with their internet I just figured there had been some damage with the storm and it would take a little while to get it all fixed.
The morning of Ava's birthday party I got up to finish a few last minute items including printing the tags for the party favors. Since I needed to download the owl picture I used for the bags wouldn't you know it that the internet wasn't working and resetting it didn't seem to make a difference either. I kept getting a DSL Fail message when I tried to connect. Finally I called technical support and spent over an hour on the phone with their representative. We went round and round with the tech support person about what was wrong and what lights were lit up on the modem. She had me unplug the wireless airport we use and plug the DSL line directly into the computer. That fixed nothing. Then she has me turn everything off, unplug it, plug it back in, they resend the signal, etc., etc., etc. over and over again. Nothing worked During this long drawn-out process she tells me I must have a virus on my computer. I tell her I highly doubt that is the problem for two reasons 1. We have a mac desktop and there are not too many viruses targeted to mac computers and 2. We had just, within the past week, had a computer scrubbed and updated by the geniuses at the apple store. I was 99.99% sure we didn't have a virus. That's when I got some weird error message while trying one of her fixes that said it couldn't process my request because malicious content had been detected. That was when things got good. When I read her the error message, she told me that wasn't an error message that could be generated by the Motorola modem and I must have been going to suspicious websites. She then point blank asked me if I had been going to porn sites because that was a suspicious and malicious website and that was likely my problem. I was so shocked she was accusing me of looking at porn that I didn't get offended right away. I explained to her that I was the mom of four small children and didn't have time for porn. I don't think she believed me. She was adamant that nothing was wrong with the DSL line or the modem. After that, I gave up on getting the internet working with her help and hung up. I ended up going to my parents to download the owl tags for the party.
Eventually, husband was able to get the internet working again (I think he has the special touch) and I actually thought it was working better, or so it seemed. I was only having to reset the modem once or twice a day for the past week or so which was such an improvement over what it had been I thought things were finally getting fixed. No such luck. When it went out and stayed out last week I put husband on the job. NOTE: I am much nicer and more patient when dealing with people on the phone like customer service representatives. Husband however is awesome at getting things done. He is better able to get through to people and get them to do their jobs than I am. So when I am getting nowhere in dealing with people, I call him in to do the heavy lifting.
On Saturday husband called technical support again about our lack of internet and this time the customer support person was even more clueless than last time, if that is possible. No one accused us of frequenting port sites this time, but the woman just couldn't understand what our problem was or why we were upset. Husband started off the conversation by telling her that he was ready to switch our internet service to another provider if she couldn't get the issues resolved. This time, instead of the problem being from our frequenting porn sites, she determined the modem had burned out and was no longer functioning and we would have to buy a new one from her. She almost wouldn't take no for an answer. She kept saying, "I'm going to place that order for your new modem now," to which we would respond, "No, I do not want to purchase a new modem." Eventually, she caught on to our displeasure and the fact that we were looking to switch services and asked if she could call back in 30 minutes to give us time to make a decision. That was when I got on the phone and told her we needed a few hours to investigate our other options for internet service. Before hanging up she promised she would call me back in 2-3 hours. During those 2 hours I called and switched our internet service to our cable provider, and while I am not a huge fan of our cable provider, their customer representative knew his products, available packages and pricing, and was able to answer all the questions both husband and I could think up, all without accusing me of being a closet porn addict.
So we switched. It was easy and so far (knock on wood) we haven't had to reset the modem even once and it has been up and running for 16 whole hours. And just in case you were wondering, that other DSL representative that was supposed to call us back never did. Shocking I know. Maybe she was too busy looking at porn.
BTW the major non cable provider's CSR who handled cancellation of service was apologetic and even offered to send us a free modem, but I told her that if I had spoken with her on Saturday, perhaps, now no way was I risking the wrath of Wife.
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